Sunday, February 14, 2010

It should be noted that this level of illiterate paste-eating chowderheadedness is not always indicated in home schooling situations. In fact, you'll hear from a number of progressive, atheist parents on the TFN blog who have chosen, wisely, to homeschool because Texas is doing is damnedest to turn public schools here into little Christian houses of indoctrination. If I were a parent, I'd homeschool, absolutely. How else could I be sure my kid was getting a sound grounding in history and science, free from right-wing ideological revisionism? But it's true that a significant amount of homeschooling is done by fundamentalist Christian parents seeking to destroy their kids' minds and future opportunities by entrenching that very ideology. And I think that's what we're seeing the hilarious after-effects of here.

23 comments:

Though I'm trying to be more constructive and less mean and all...I can't think of any other valid response to this then..."DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!"

When confronted, in the General Assembly of Virginia, with “A Bill establishing a provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion," to be paid for by a general assessment by the Commonwealth, Madison “remonstrated” against it for many reasons, one of which was that:

Any state establishment of a Religion would “foster in those who still reject it, a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.”

My wife went to cAtholic school all her life, and they seemed to have less of a wing-nut attitude than the public schools I went to.

If/when when have a kid we want to go private. The is a Quaker school here, which we may try as apparently the Quakers believe you can indeed question the existence of a deity. There is only one non-religious private school, but this is the South... ;-)

I am always wary of home schooling. I don't think a child's first introduction to full-on education should be college. That seems like too much stimulus.

George: How does teaching a kid, for instance, accurate evolutionary biology without the taint of ID constitute "left-wing ideological revisionism"? I'll grant you that morons like Don McLeroy think it is. But the way the Texas SBOE is going, they're pretty much taking the attitude that any school curriculum that isn't teaching history lessons like "White Christians did everything awesome!" and "The first president of the US was Jesus!" must be peddling lefty "revisionism." I mean, shit, George, these people want to teach history that suppresses any information about people like Cesar Chavez and throws in cheerleading for Phyllis Schlafly and Rush fucking Limbaugh. Tell me there's not something broken there.

Not that there has not been liberal biases in some classes, I can actually think of a few, but those all occurred at my PRIVATE high-school, and there were teachers pushing conservative agendas as well.

It may be my bias but I don't think agenda pushing is big in liberal circles due to them being well...more liberal when it comes to tolerating what people believe.

The problem is that a good deal of conservative views in this day and age are flatly against reality. (WMDs existence, creationism, historical revisionism towards christianity, historical revisionism minimizing racial institutions, historical revisionism warping the view on fascism, birthers, sex ed, etc). The left has some stupid views like this as well (9-11 truthers, Al Queda 'never existed' bs, cultural relativism, over application of post modernism, The secret, etc) But they don't seem to pop up in the class room as much.

Now to put it in perspective my religion teacher got some complaints that he was teaching a liberal bias. He was teaching the bible...the whole bible.

"Well I graduated in 2005 from Texas Public Schools and I didn't learn how Evolution worked until 2007."

I received my bachelor's in 2006. I learned how evolution worked two years later, whilst doing research on becoming an atheist. I understood that it was real, of course, but I had to find out the details on my own. The process wasn't readily available as part of any curriculum in almost 17 years of being educated by the state of Tennessee's public schools and colleges.

My point is that this problem - and it's a huge problem - is somewhat trans-ideological. Both sides have tried to turn schoolbooks into pamphlets for their respective worldviews over the years.

In this case, the nonsense comes from the (Religious-)Right but as a kid growing up in NY state I encountered "history" classes and textbooks so outrageously doctrinally Leftward as to make the SBOE's stunts downright mild in comparison.

That's history and such. On the bio/science front, the SBOE is wrong wrong wrong and that's all there is to it. :)

BTW, I know it's tiresome to have me popping in here repeatedly to declare "Hey, the other side does it, too!" when some Republican's or Conservative's misconduct is under discussion. Indeed, it makes me seem more Right-ward than I actually am. One day we must have a proper, extended conversation about Liberalism, Conservatism, tradition, culture, Atheism, religion - perhaps I could make the state of my mind more clear?

Examples please? Cause I remember them putting everything up to class debate including "Was it right to genocide Indians?" or "Was the Japanese internment right?" and presenting both sides to that as well as whether we should have forced the south to abolish slavery, and all sorts of wtfness.

The only one i can maybe remember is 2nd amendment stuff due to 'no guns in schooly' bias.

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PLEASE NOTE: The Atheist Experience has moved to a new location, and this blog is now closed to comments. To participate in future discussions, please visit http://www.freethoughtblogs.com/axp.The Atheist Experience is a weekly live call-in television show sponsored by the Atheist Community of Austin. This independently-run blog (not sponsored by the ACA) features contributions from current and former hosts and co-hosts of the show.